Comments arose – That reminds me of the limerick about the “young lady from Natchez,” but I’ll refrain from quoting it. Comments on my “editorial notice” led into a discussion about the almost indefinable phrase “So there!” and its equivalents in French, Spanish, and Esperanto (Alors là!, Por lo tanto, Tiel mi diras).
I happened to be having at the same time a discussion with Jack Warren, an advanced Esperantist, about one: not the numeral, but the pronoun for an indefinite person. At least some other languages have it; in Esperanto it is oni. It fills a need, but in English it has come to be avoided as old-fashioned or repipi, because of the absurdity of how it sounds when repeated, so it is replaced by a mishmash of uses of you and we and they.
I had a friend who, being half French, was prone to using pronoun one in English; he was one of a group with whom I was traveling in Iran. One morning he lay in his sleeping bag musing aloud on the impossibility of getting oneself out of it; there was the sound of a scuffle, and a huskier member of the party saying: “One has been removed from one’s sleeping bag, has one not?”
French and German retain the indefinite pronoun and use it without trouble. Once in Charleston, South Carolina, I wandered into a hotel to spend some time watching games in a great chess tournament. The grandmaster Arnold Denker stood chatting with a crony; I overheard him saying: “Man hat so schnell gespielt!” This could have meant “They were playing so fast!” or “We were playing so fast!”
My favorite example in French is the cartoon (I wish I could find it again) showing an Indian pointing to sails on the horizon and calling to his fellow tribesmen: “Regardez, les gars, on est découvert!” In contrast with the starchy feeling of English one, French on sounds almost as cool as les gars (which is much cooler than “boys”).
I had to look up Esperantist and discovered that Esperanto was a language invented in 1887 by a Russian philologist. As I’m sure you know, it was derived from the commonest words in the most important European languages. It was intended to be used as an international language. Thanks for the linguistic lesson.
By the way, I didn’t mean to say you were rude in my last comment. “So there” is more playful than rude. “So take that” on the other hand, is a bit rude, or at least terse.
Speaking of language, I always strive to use proper English because one who uses poor grammar ain’t got no class.
“Take that”, in the language of my childhood, was more than rude: it was the accompaniment to a fisticuff.
And “rude” meant more than discourteous, it meant “indecent”.
I had to look up the definition of fisticuff. In the process I learned that the root word of fist is the same as the root word of five (five fingers made into one).
I was also puzzled about how rude could mean indecent; I thought that “rude” only referred to discourtesy. I thought “indecent” referred to not wearing enough clothes, or treating people unfairly (eg. not paying a decent wage).
After looking up the definitions, I discovered that the actual definition of indecent is, “going against recognized standards or good taste”. The 2nd definition of “rude” in my dictionary is “without culture , learning, or refinement”. These definitions are similar, describing a person without proper manners. This must be what you mean by indecent. Ive always used the word crude to describe an unrefined person rather than rude or indecent.
It’s intriguing how different societies assign different meanings to the same word. Where did you live as a child?
You have the looking-up habit, which I’ve long had. It surprised me that people could wonder vaguely about words, and could entertain mistaken notions about them, when they could easily find out.
Rude and crude both go back to Latin (rudis and crudus, both perhaps originally meaning “raw”). As words do, they’ve fanned out into many senses.
Rude was used by little boys in the middle of England to refer to matters sexual, excretory, or otherwise “dirty”. It could have been an extension, or misunderstanding, of admonitions by adults, “Don’t be rude!”
I’m surprised that no one has asked me about another word I used: repipi.
Sounds like what you do when you didn’t completely evacuate the first time. Rude, eh?
No, never thought of that. I’ll do a special post on repipi.
Sorry about the crudeness of my last post but I wanted to convey my understanding of your definition of rude; “Rude was used by little boys in the middle of England to refer to matters … excretory…”